


Honest Enough

by twocrabs



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: All I know how to do is write character studies and make myself sad, Catharsis, Comfort, Heart-to-Heart, Let these two be friends already, Short and upsetting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 06:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18493291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twocrabs/pseuds/twocrabs
Summary: Weeks later and they weren’t friends yet, really, but they were both still flayed and raw in the same terrible ways.So fuck it, he thought. And in the cool dawn on the roof of that awful apartment, Eliot bled his guts out for her.





	Honest Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I watched the entire show in 6 days. I've got some stuff I need to work through. 
> 
> Warnings for the implied everything that these two have been through.

Marina’s apartment— _ Kady’s apartment? _ —whoever’s fucking apartment that they’d been fucking  _ squatting _ in now for who the fuck knows how long—it’s huge. And it’s cold, and it’s fucking  _ brutalist _ , and he hates it. It’s got everything they need, sure, but none of the things he  _ wants _ . It’s got a giant, glassed-in shower but the water never stays hot long enough. It’s got a fully stocked bar, with top shelf booze and all the fixings but none of the brands he likes. It’s got a couch big enough to sit them all and then some, but it’s faux mohair and grey and hard and always in the way of things. The apartment is soul-draining; but it has roof access. 

The door to the stairwell had been locked when he first tried it, and magic was still fucked, but he had time to kill while he didn’t sleep. He figured it better to sit there, and pick at the door with a bobby pin and a credit card, then wander room to room, biting his nails and counting the seconds until someone else woke up. He’d been doing that for weeks anyway. He was over it. 

It took him a couple of hours, but he managed to pop the lock. He had been spending the last several nights since then sitting, back to the ledge, smoking, shivering, and watching the planes blink across the sky. It wasn’t more fun than haunting the place, but the cold made it easier for him to stay awake, and that’s really all he cared about. 

A week, maybe two, (when did time become so flexible?) into his new ritual, after a day of totally fruitless and exhausting research—anti-god, anti-library, anti-fucking- _ everything _ it felt like—he wrapped himself in his longest coat, and shuffled up the stairs to the roof. It was a cool, clear night; if he was lucky, he’d see some stars. 

An hour passed, or two, or three. It was still dark but the streets below were getting noisier as graveyard shifts ended, and the earliest risers started their days. He’d go back down soon, he thought. Start up Marina’s—Kady’s—fucking  _ whoever’s _ stupid automated Norwegian  _ terrible _ fucking coffee maker. He’d pretend he’d slept a few hours, even though he was pretty sure at least Q could tell when he was bullshitting him. Margo would be able to tell too, if she came today, like she’d been trying to, for a while. 

The door to the roof creaked open, and Eliot nearly inhaled his cigarette. 

Julia seemed surprised to find him there, but only for a second. She held a half-emptied bottle of gin—heinous, blue-bottled, silver-labeled swill—and looked about as good as he felt. Wordlessly, she walked over to his ledge, and sat down next to him, cross-legged, so their knees touched. 

She handed him the bottle, and he passed her a cigarette. 

They sat in silence, watching the spaces between the buildings as the sky faded into purple. 

And then softly, “You escaped.” Julia wasn’t looking at him, and it wasn’t a question. “You got out. Of your happy place. At least once, right?”

He could barely hear her over the hum of traffic sixteen stories down, but, “Once. For a second, yeah.” He didn’t look at her either, and when she didn’t respond right away he was worried he’d been too quiet. 

“How did...” she swallowed, finally. “How? How did you get past the terrors? How—”

“Most repressed memory.”  _ Had she been alone in there?  _ “It fucking sucked. But I guess that’s pretty par—” 

“No, I, yeah I know. I couldn’t...I couldn’t stay in mine. You know. I couldn’t watch, or—not long enough, at least, for an escape or—”

“ _ God _ ,” he very nearly gasped, and it came out louder than he wanted it to, cutting her off. “You don’t—” he inhaled, and clenched his jaw, and bit his tongue. “You don’t have to tell me—” 

“It was Reynard,” she said, her voice cold and level, and instantly Eliot was nauseous.  _ Of course it was _ , he thought, his jaw working, trying to find something to say.  _ As if the whole thing wasn’t so unbelievably fucked up already. Fucking of course it was.  _ He wanted to reach out, for a moment. He wanted to place a shaking hand on her knee, or her shoulder, or  _ something _ . He wanted—

“I’m sorry—” he started, or tried to, at least.

“You don’t have to. You don’t have to tell me yours, either,” she said, and goddamn it if it didn’t sound like she meant it. “I just. I just wanted to know how you did it. How you—”

“It was the day I turned Quentin down.” He kept his eyes fixed on a blinking radio tower, somewhere across the river. 

She had to know, he figured. It was Julia, after all. Julia the best friend. The childhood crush. The first heartbreak. Julia the secret-keeper, the faithful the steadfast. Surely Q told her everything. None of this could come as a shock. 

“The day we got back from the mosaic.” He clutched his pant legs, his hands numb from the cold, mostly. “Got our memories back, I mean.” He squeezed his eyes shut, shamed, embarrassed, to sit next to Julia with this, of all possible memories, to mark as his worst. “You know.” 

The sun was starting to throw streaks of pink through the violet sky. It was clear, except for a line of thin, silvery clouds just above the horizon. The silence filled and worried him, but what didn’t, these days? He was sure she hated him, in that moment. Hated him for the bearability of his past. Hated him for hurting Q. Hated him being there, on that roof, on that morning. 

But then she said, “What mosaic?” and whatever terrible thing had gripped him turned to mist, relieved and unbelieving. 

“He never told you,” he said, which wasn’t a question either. And for a moment he considered standing up and walking away, leaving something of him left private and undissected, from one person at least. But—and he still couldn’t look at her—he could feel her knee against his, and he was aware suddenly but not for the first time, of the things they had shared. Barely acquaintances before, they both knew the sensation of being dragged by force out of their own minds. They knew the fear of being perfectly happy, but knowing it was a trap. They both lived knowing their bodies had been used to kill. They had both been offered up—prepared for sacrifice— _ exorcised. _

Weeks later and they weren’t friends yet, really, but they were both still flayed and raw in the same terrible ways. So fuck it, he thought, and in the cool dawn on the roof of that awful apartment, Eliot bled his guts out for her. 

He started with the clock, and with Q reading him the section out of the books about the puzzle. He left in every detail he could, and by way of reminding him she was still there, she repeated the important bits back at him. 

“Fifty years,” Julia whispered, contemplative and awestruck. Eliot nodded, his bones feeling suddenly heavy.

And then, “Q’s a dad?” and her voice was thick, but there was an invisible smile in it that made his vision watery. 

She echoed after him, in her distant, barely audible voice, “ _ wife died _ ” and “ _ son left _ ” and “ _ got old _ ” and, again, “... _ fifty years _ .” 

Finally, almost incredulously, Julia asked, “You remember dying?” and he needed to take a moment to think. 

“No, not really.” He lit another cigarette. “I remember sitting in my chair, totally useless because of the— _ fucking arthritis  _ in my knees and—and Q was placing the tiles down, so...so slowly.” He could see it in his mind like it was the night before. He could feel the dappled sun on his face, and smell breakfast in the summer air. “And I was just watching him. And then for a second I wasn’t sore anymore, and everything felt light, and then...then the whole insane fucking dream of it all just stops.”  

And he was on the roof of that terrible apartment, and the sun was nearly up, and the air smelled like New York.

“It sounds wonderful,” Julia said, sighing, leaning ever-closer to Eliot’s big black coat as a breeze rushed over them.

“He wanted to do it again.” And that’s how he picked up where her original question left him. What memory let him escape? How did he evade the terrors? How did he manage to break out? “But I turned him down.” 

He told her, then, about watching himself do it—about standing there, fists clenched as he listened to the bullshit roll out of his own mouth—about how he wanted to strangle himself. And then he told her about watching Q watching him. How Q’s face had fallen after he had already looked away, and twisted, however briefly, in a way that made Eliot’s stomach ache. 

And then, as long as he was being honest, he told her that he had interrupted his own memory—even though he knew it would make no difference on the outside—to kneel in front of Q, and ask him for courage, and kiss him again, just one more time. 

That’s when he realized that Julia was looking at him. She had slid, ever closer, so that they were hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder, and her head was tilted up, watching him as he talked in circles about another relationship that he had fucked up, all while she had to relive— _ god _ —

When he finally looked at her, the golden pink light from the sunrise on her face made her look so much like a goddess that the hair on the back of his neck stood up. 

So he looked forward again, and lit another cigarette, and crossed his arms, and said, “That’s it.” 

And Julia leaned her head against his shoulder, convinced that the sun was already warming her up, and thinking, purposefully,  _ No it’s not _ . 


End file.
